I Love You - Very Good, Based on 4 Critics

Tiny Mix Tapes - 80Based on rating 4/5

80

An album named I Love You with a picture of planet Earth on the cover? Really? What is this, the new Yoko Ono album? (Dude’s been there, apparently). Isn’t this a little too earnest and holistic for our, um, epoch? But Baltimore experimentalist and former Wzt Hearts member Jason Urick is really just cheerfully paraphrasing what’s actually both socially and sonically obvious about said epoch. As “A”rt (insofar as any of it can be rendered in binary) detaches from the mothership of capitalism, both consumer and producer must, arguably, be driven by Love or Nothing et al.

Electronic drone sculptor Jason Urick left his longtime home of Baltimore, Maryland shortly before the completion of his third full-length, I Love You, hopping over to the rainy, creative wonderland of Portland, Oregon. This transition and its effects on Urick's personal life were intense, to say the least, and the music on I Love You reflects both a life in transition and Urick's sound moving into new, sometimes scary places. Previous albums explored slowly shifting landscapes in a far more ambient head space, with glacial drones burying gauzy beats on his debut Husbands and in-the-red dub echoes colliding with minimal textures on Fussing & Fighting.

The changes in a single Jason Urick track are gradual and sometimes imperceptible. But his musical development across records he's made for Thrill Jockey since his band Wzt Hearts broke up is clear. Husbands, from 2009, offered mostly thick drones, suggesting a digital take on Spacemen 3's further-out meditations. Dub-inflected loops lurked beneath the drones on 2010's Fussing & Fighting 12".

Jason UrickI Love You[Thrill Jockey; 2012]By Ray Finlayson; June 13, 2012Purchase at: Insound (Vinyl) | Amazon (MP3 & CD) | iTunes | MOGTweetThere appear to be two covers to Jason Urick’s album I Love You. One is a spectacular shot of Earth from space, capturing the lower half of Africa with a swirl of clouds covering the Antarctica region. The other is just as lovely, displaying an equally exquisite spherical shot of the moon.